Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Critiquing Utopian Capitalism.

Utopian capitalism is the image of capitalism as a
self-correcting deliverer of endlessly rising standards of living. Utopian
capitalism is the religion around the economic theory of capitalism. Not all
"capitalisms" are utopian. The capitalism of organised crime usually admits it is
exploitative and as unfair as it can be. Without going to that extreme you can
also advocate capitalism as an imperfect system.

Capitalism is a workable way to make stuff and get stuff for
many people. It’s also handily impersonal. The middle class and above generally
enjoy the private sense of power that just handing over money for things gives
them. It’s convenient and convenience is empowering in a way.

Capitalism's benefits however diminish over time. Wandering up and down supermarket aisles for the obscure milk
location and figuring out how to self-scan it at the check out, it’s easy to
see that even convenience doesn’t survive market concentration. Meanwhile more
and more people able to work have no role to play even in providing that
missing convenience. Eventually capitalism becomes stupider and stupider.

Capitalism requires a good revolution every so often to
redistribute the wealth and means of production. This is because capitalist
competition only exists when wealth is roughly equal at the starting blocks.
However capitalism's whole reward structure is such that success in one
competition is being able to bias the start of the next race in your favour. Consequently
if capitalism has worked then after a few races any competition under
capitalism is a sham. The only way to make it function again is to reset the
scoreboard so to speak. In economic terms that is to cancel debts and break up stashes
of wealth.

To avoid a revolution capitalism has tried to improve itself
with a welfare system and public health and schools. These improvements give
the game a longer life but can’t maintain it indefinitely. The whole point of
capitalism is to concentrate wealth. It’s not a secondary effect. Concentrated
wealth ultimately infects the political system (as it has ours) and then treats
the public commonwealth as obstacles to wear down. Once our political system is
under the control of the super wealthy, then business as usual has to be
radically disrupted and the values of wealth and power reset, hence
“revolution”. Nothing less can restore the basis of a functional capitalism.

The problem with revolutionary movements is that they often
fall for an expectation to be utopian themselves. That is to say, revolutionary
movements are expected to have “solutions” and “answers” which mean that after
their “success” no further revolutions will ever be required. That’s utopian
thinking. It’s alternative is a revolution which merely sees itself as a
necessary reset of economic and political power – one which may be needed again
and again in the future despite the solutions and answers each revolution
proposes.

The Occupy movements have been criticized for not meeting the
utopian obligation of political discourse. They fail to come up with answers
and solutions that will last for ever. A similar non-utopian spirit seems to be
a part of the Idle No More movement sweeping North America.
I’m glad to see it. In Tolstoy feeds me Humble Pie I wrote about how an obligation to be
utopian replaces our responsibility to love. Instead it justifies tyrants and
mobs.

We need to specifically critique utopian thinking as it relates
to capitalism. This is because utopian capitalism (the religion) puts pressure
on its critics to have utopian alternatives. If we can show that utopian
capitalism is nonsense we can alleviate the need for revolutionary movements
under that capitalism to have perfect answers themselves. We can embrace those
movements as merely necessary reset buttons of any system, capitalist or
otherwise that we adopt.

Utopian worlds are perfect images which stand apart from reality.
Firstly utopian worlds are apart from reality because they make unprecedented
claims on society, human wisdom, technology, or raw materials. Although utopian
worlds struggle to be realized, they still make strong claims to “work” based
on some unquestioned ingredient that covers all shortages in the above
resources. For example religious cults usually try and create small utopian
societies based on the authority of their leaders. The leader’s unique intelligence
or access to God is supposed to provide the absolute knowledge all other
societies have lacked. Resolving that lack is what makes the utopian cult work unlike
any past society.

Utopian capitalism's unquestioned ingredient is a magic belief
that the rate of economic activity creates economic resources. The first
concern of economics is the problem of scarcity. Scarcity is how economists
refer to the limitations of resources in contrast to the greater wants for
those resources. Trying to feed yourself and four housemates’ dinner with two sausages and rice is the essence of economics. You have more wants than
resources and must decide how to manage that. That’s what being economical
actually means. Utopian capitalism pretends that by moving resources around quickly
they will somehow magically expand so that they will meet all wants. The fact
that resources have to ultimately get expended to meet wants is ignored.

The ludicrosity (my word) of just increased economic
activity overcoming scarce resources is apparent once you look straight at it.
That’s why we seldom do. Instead there are vague references to technology and
efficiency as the sources of limitless growth when rarely, a source is enquired
after. However in practice it is the rate in which money is spent that utopian capitalism
celebrates as the objective of any effort to improve the economy.

Consider what Gross Domestic Product is. It is the amount of
economic activity over a period of time. The easiest way to increase GDP is
just to increase the speed of economic activity related to the same basic stuff
– that is to buy and sell more, between more people, more often in relation to
meeting the same want. That would be like the housemates employing two to be
chef, two to do marketing and one as food critic, each paying the other in a
special housemate currency. GDP will shoot through the roof but the dinner of
rice and two snags is exactly the same. Utopian capitalism would believe that
things have improved.

Utopian worlds also stand apart from reality by foregoing a
creation story. A utopian world just is. This a-historical aspect reflects that
utopian visions have traditionally been the visions of ombudsmen and aldermen.
They are top down descriptions of society that recognize designs, not the descriptions
of labourers and artisans which recognize processes of creation. Even when any
losses involved in building a utopia are recognized, such loss has to be
deducted from the absolute perfection of eternity once utopia is built. Infinity
minus anything less is still infinity, which is why there is often a lot of
death involved in implementing utopian visions. Such death just doesn’t matter
in the future utopia.

This willingness to accept a bloody creation is a part of utopian
capitalism. We know that life is not good for people in poor countries whose
economies are orientated to luxury goods for export. We know that even in
wealthy countries untreated preventable illnesses abound, people enter lifelong
debts for their education and housing (if they are lucky) and businesses
routinely relocate to where labour is the cheapest and unsafest. These are treated
as forgiveable hiccups on the path to utopia. However what makes this truly
horrific is that utopian capitalism is always never quite here. It is always in
the process of creation, and always generating costs that get discounted
against its glorious future.

This endless creation phase is a consequence of utopian capitalism’s
acceptance of meeting unlimited wants as a goal. In economics its been historically reasonable to assume people actually have unlimited wants because people have longed to have big
families. We might accept that our hypothetical housemates only want a certain
amount and certain quality of food for their own dinner and any more is
unwanted however once we accept that they all want as many kids as possible
then there is a very distant limit to how many resources they will need to meet all their (future)
wants. It's effectively unlimited. Social changes in the west, particularly creditable to feminism, environmentalism and
improved health, challenge whether our wants really are unlimited.
Certainly in my own social circles there is a rhetoric that supports less
consumption along with smaller families as preferable. We say we feel like we're drowning in consumables although its hard to tell if this is really reducing our consumption. This years tech products remain the standard.

Whether or not we will always want more than we have on some level
however, it is not necessary to make attaining unlimited wants the goal of our society. If
the definition of happiness is the meeting of unlimited wants it seems sane to
suggest we need to accept some unhappiness. If the process of meeting those
wants is the increased rate of economic activity then it is certainly sane to
ask when that process might cause more unhappiness than it alleviates (if it
alleviates anything). That kind of sanity can all be avoided with utopian thinking.
Utopian capitalism promises we will (paradoxically) reach the impossible goal
of meeting unlimited wants. Exactly what that will look like no-one can say but
supposedly it will make the suffering all worthwhile “when” we get there.

Utopian capitalism has a method that is silly - more
economic activity - to reach a goal that can’t be reached - attaining unlimited wants. My
child could come up with a utopian vision that makes more sense. That is an
indication that utopian capitalism is not something that we accidentally came
up with. Its design is so poor that it can’t be the product of human error.
It’s more likely this is a system designed by some people playing it for
personal gain and then sold to us cynically as inevitable. In Australia our
major political parties and mainstream media companies are all on board for the
sale. It’s definitely time to reset the game.

Once we realize that utopian capitalism is the silliest of
all religions we can oppose it without needing to have absolute answers
ourselves. The Occupy movements and Idle No More may not be able to clearly
articulate a perfect world view that will never need further correction. However
no such world view is really offered by capitalism either.

4 comments:

You need to better script what it is you are trying to say. I often found the article difficult to read/follow with the improper use of the word "however" scattered about. An investment into a book on comma use should certainly be in your future as well.

I think your conclusions are correct only if the underlying suppositions are too. "However" (for 1st commenter. ha!), Utopia and Capitalism are merged to the extent that Utopia becomes a style of Capitalism in your definition. Instead, consider Utopia as a separate situation and Capitalism as improved by the effects of Utopian philosophy. These may include endless stable money and most importantly the final ideal of Utopia - a flexible *boundary* without specification or claims. When you tell people what details are in Utopia it ceases to be Utopia. You may merely define it as what the society decides may not exist within. Otherwise you have limited someone else with an approval of behavior or condition.

I'm working on a clear understanding of what I'm talking about here: www.utopiancapitalism.tk

Utopian Capitalism is a failed 19th century materialist ideology. The existing system deploys economists and public officials as its front men but is comprised of a series of interlocking, privately organized rackets, immunized against political challenge by a legal structure legislated at the behest of less than 5% of the electorate. Artificial scarcity, mass incarceration, abetted by aggressive militarized policing and foreign recourse extraction by occupations are necessary means upon which the domestic economy depends thru public funding of a high tech military with a globally dispersed basing structure, providing mechanisms for the imposition of a global doctrine referred to as full spectrum dominance. Late capitalism whatever abstractions it may conjure as part of an elite political imaginary,, is a state of the art dystopia in practice